Newly found '75 Cesar Chavez photo highlights heartland show

Retired instructor's decades-old negatives inspire group exhibition on state heartland

This Central Valley image of labor leader Cesar Chavez with fellow farmworkers was discovered in a box of negatives.

This Central Valley image of labor leader Cesar Chavez with fellow farmworkers was discovered in a box of negatives.

Photo: Mimi Plumb

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Documentary photographer Mimi Plumb, recently retired from San Jose State University, took the photo in her early 20s while following farmworkers.

Documentary photographer Mimi Plumb, recently retired from San Jose State University, took the photo in her early 20s while following farmworkers.

Photo: Craig Hudson, The Chronicle

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Documentary photographer Mimi Plumb's images of Central Valley farmworkers are part of a group show on the heartland.

Documentary photographer Mimi Plumb's images of Central Valley farmworkers are part of a group show on the heartland.

Photo: Mimi Plumb

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Photo: Mimi Plumb

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Photo: Mimi Plumb

Newly found '75 Cesar Chavez photo highlights heartland show

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Photographer Mimi Plumb was finally getting around to digitizing her negatives from 40 years ago when a sequence from the Central Valley made her push away from the scanner and fire off an e-mail.

Independent curator Ann Jastrab was on the receiving end of a link to 121 images, and it was No. 91 that stopped her cold. "It is Cesar Chavez, and he is young and beautiful, and he is sitting on the ground like the Buddha or like Gandhi," says Jastrab, who immediately knew what to do with that image, which had never been printed. She built a group show around it - "The Valley/El Valle: Photo-Essays from California's Heartland," which runs through Sept. 19 at San Francisco City Hall.

Nine documentarians contributed to 99 images taken along Highway 99. These range from Charlotte Niel's color digital prints made in 2014 to Plumb's black and whites, which go back to 1974 when she was a 20-year-old from Walnut Creek studying photography at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Plumb's older brother, Tom, had a girlfriend who worked at the headquarters of the United Farm Workers, near Bakersfield. One weekend he enticed his younger sister to come along, on the promise of some darkroom work, so she jumped into his Toyota Corolla for the five-hour drive, her wide-angle Leica M2-R on her lap, just in case.

A good hunch, as it turned out, because Chavez pulled everybody out of headquarters to support a strike among the grape pickers in Coachella.

"I got to photograph the farmworkers, and I fell in love with the union," recalls Plumb, now 60.

Going through old negatives

From then on, it was independent study at the Art Institute, while Plumb followed the movement, which culminated in the "1,000-mile march" to distribute union ballots among the pickers.

It was around noon on Aug. 14, 1975, 30 days into the march, when Plumb came upon Chavez seated in the dirt and unshouldered her Leica.

"He was taking a break, probably we were eating," says Plumb, as she studies the image in her one-bedroom apartment, upstairs in a North Berkeley brown shingle.

She finished the march, all 59 days of it, then returned to the Art Institute to finish her bachelor of fine arts degree. Her final project was a show of the Central Valley work at the Diego Rivera Gallery. Then she put her prints and negatives and notes in a box and became an academic. After 28 years on the adjunct faculty at San Jose State, teaching photography the old way with film and emulsion, she retired in January. This gave her the time to go back through the box marked "UFW Old Negs."

"I didn't expect it to be terribly interesting," she says, "but the pictures were way better than I anticipated."

She can remember details about her image of a police helicopter buzzing the workers in the field, and a series on men in their crudely decorated rooms in the labor camps. But she doesn't remember anything about the Chavez portrait. It did not leave an impression and did not make the cut for her student show at the Art Institute.

"I didn't know I'd made that picture until a few months ago," she says. "Crazy."

Also crazy is the coincidence that the same day Plumb e-mailed Jastrab the link, Jastrab had been invited by Meg Shiffler of the San Francisco Arts Commission to organize a show of her choosing.

"That was a sign that I should do a show about the Central Valley," says Jastrab, who is the gallery director at Rayko Photo Center. She was as mesmerized by the '70s hair and fashion, even among migrant farmworkers, as the political message. "The show built from Mimi out," she says. "It was because of her."

Individual essays

The other photographers in the show are Matt Black, Sam Comen, Lou Dematteis, Francisco Dominguez, Kathya Landeros, Ken Light, Charlotte Niel and Antonio Zazueta Olmos. There is also a set of 20 photographs from The San Francisco Chronicle's archives. The work is bunched on one long, brightly lit hallway, with the individual essays separated by office doors.

The exhibition, part of the Arts Commission's Galleries Art at City Hall program, is free for the cost of emptying your pockets and passing through security. If that is too high a price, the images are also in four different posters that are hung in 40 locations along Market Street.

The Chavez portrait gets top billing on one of the posters, but at City Hall it is in the middle, mixed among the others.

"We're all equal in this show," Plumb says.

The Valley/El Valle: Photo-Essays From California's Heartland: Runs through Sept. 19 at San Francisco City Hall. 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. weekdays. Free. Panel discussion 6 p.m. Aug. 12 at the S.F. Public Library's Main Branch. www.sfartscommission.org/gallery. To watch a short video, go to http://bit.ly/1n8kUog.